25. Venatio
This next game is so horrifying, it may make some of you cringe. Venatio was a Roman game where humans and wild animals like lions, leopards, tigers, bears, and more were pitted in a colosseum against one another. The animals were not fed, which made them more ferocious and likely to attack humans as prey. One historic account by Titus claims that 10,000 gladiators battled 5,000 animals in a single day. There was no point in this game outside of watching men hunt wild beasts. The number of animals per day could have been an exaggeration, but it was surely a lot of bloodshed. The sheer number of animals the Romans killed during these games is what contributed to the extinction of many of those species in Europe.
Earlier on the list, we also mentioned how female slaves were sometimes fed to the animals in the colosseum. This would have been during the Venatio. Women were often given a dagger or some other small weapon that clearly wouldn’t be enough to defend herself from a hungry lion or tiger. The practice was sometimes used as “damnatio ad bestias“, or “condemnation to beasts” to punish Christians or other people who were labeled as heretics. Men and women were usually brought out in separate groupings to fight the animals.